Is your decision-making suspect?  Do you continually date strippers or bad boys who are 'getting their band together' and wish you could instead replace your own judgment with a prosthesis?

Maybe one day.  Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have created a prosthetic device which is capable of restoring decision-making due to reduced capacity due from brain disease or injury - in non-human primates, anyway.

Variation in facial shape is an easy way to explain phenotypes in humans to people who don't understand biology all that well. Monozygotic twins have almost identical faces and siblings usually have more similar faces than unrelated people, implying our facial morphology is under genetic regulation - but still little has been known about the genetic basis of normal human facial morphology. 

In a recent ScienceDebate questionnaire response, speechwriters for Candidate Mitt Romney tried to distinguish themselves from speechwriters for President Obama on education(1), and then proceeded to say the exact same thing Candidate Obama said in 2008 about education - that the union system of protecting the teachers who have been around the longest rather than rewarding the ones who are the best is a big mistake.
 

Here is a diet plan that requires no special meal purchases or even exercise, it just requires a willingness to believe that correlation-causation arrows fly backwards.  People, especially women, who read food labels are thinner.

The results of surveys on the relationship between reading food labels and obesity indicated that the body mass index of those consumers who read the label is 1.49 points lower than those who don't read food labels when shopping for food. This translates as a reduction of almost 9 lbs. for an American woman 5 feet 3 inches tall weighing 163 lbs - already obese.

The idea that we are inside a simulation is true anyway (if we define “simulation” as being described as emergent from a computational substrate). Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University’s 'Future of Humanity Institute', and others became famous with such more than 2000 years old ideas warmed up in fashionably modern lingo, see Simulation Hypothesis on Wikipedia.

The holographic universe: A “simulation” anyway!

What would the world look like with 7 billion people and no way to scientifically have created better ways of producing food?  

A lot of poor vegetarians, that's what.  And only rich people eating meat.

Organic food corporations love to claim that their process is 'sustainable'. Vegetarians love to claim that meat is both unethical and bad for the planet.  It makes them happy partners ... as long as science is ignored.

The publication of the complete human genome sequence in 2007 made the genetic code readily accessible to researchers and served as a platform for the countless advances in science,medicine, and sequencing technology which were to follow.

Following the completion of the human genome project, researchers set out to develop a comprehensive ‘map’ of which genes coded for which gene products, or proteins.This allowed researchers to track how a protein was affected when a gene sequence was altered and the resulting changes within the cell. Subsequently, a number of diseases and disorders were linked to changes-or mutations- within protein coding genes.

Never in a million years.

That was my first reaction to finding out that the University of Leicester (where I am based) was about to commence an archaeological dig to uncover the bones of Richard III.

But, a press conference this morning has showed be to be totally wrong - or at least, woefully pessimistic. Because, it seems that a team of archeaologists has uncovered some bones that are indeed very likely to have been Richard III's.

There are LEED-certified buildings and there are zero-energy buildings. And then there’s Villa Åkarp outside of Malmo, Sweden — an energy-plus residential home. In other words, a home that produces more energy than it uses.

Since construction was completed on the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in 2009, it has raised the bar for what is possible in home construction. Villa Åkarp takes its design cues from the passive house, or Passivhaus, movement, a design program for creating super-insulated houses that rely on window orientation, thermal recovery and other elements for heating and cooling.

But Villa Åkarp ups the ante.

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) famously offers $1000000 to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities.  Its has helped to stem the spread of pseudoscience.  The Quantum Randi Challenge is quite similar (although its main purpose for you personally is to teach you quantum mechanics intuitively):  The large reward it offers is instant fame.  Whoever overcomes the challenge would deserve a Nobel Prize in physics!  But the Quantum Randi Challenge does not depend on a foundation that is